The new digital divide By Joel Achenbach in Washington Post
Yammer as a Time Inc Game Changer
Here are the benefits to scrap the e-mail in ComputerWorld.DK [Danish - use Google Translate or Chrome]
Author ArchiveThe new digital divide By Joel Achenbach in Washington Post Yammer as a Time Inc Game Changer Here are the benefits to scrap the e-mail in ComputerWorld.DK [Danish - use Google Translate or Chrome]
Mar
27
2012
Wired for Success? Go #noemail says Psychology Today’s Ray WilliamsPosted by Paul in #noemailRay Williams, columnist for Psychology Today and author of “Breaking Bad Habits,” suggest that you break your email habits and go #noemail. In “Is It Time to Ban Emails Because They Reduce Productivity?” Williams answers his title question YES as he rehearses, with citations, much of the most recent thinking including those who say you just can’t about email. He concludes:
Today people waste tons of bandwidth sending, as Borenstein did, 100s of such images at a time to their networks for friends. Each message going into a silo where it is quickly forgotten and not communally shared. Comments about the images, sound or other attached media are either lost or over shared. Receivers are at once delighted and annoyed but the clumsiness of attachments and how their email reader handles those attachments. Attachments remain the worst way to collaborate. Still, it seemed like at least a half good idea at the time. (Borenstein admits what he feels are other failings of attachments including the term “attachment” itself in the Guardian article). Today things have changed. Attachments should be like horse shoes, repurposed for use in an entirely different game or merely posted on the doorway as an amusement. As Borenstein himself notes: “The second of [Buddhism's] Four Noble Truths tells us that the cause of all suffering is attachments”
Mar
08
2012
#noemail – interesting forthcoming paper – “A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons”: An Empirical Study of Work Without EmailPosted by Paul in #noemail“A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons”: An Empirical Study of Work Without Email Mark, G.J., Voida, S. & Cardello, A.V. (to appear). “A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons”: An Empirical Study of Work Without Email. To appear in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012), Austin, Texas, May 5–10. ACM Press. Abstract Starting with the past, Washington Post got some hoax busting advice from email historians that resulted in a long but not quite satisfying article with some very good links to orthodox and substantiated email histories including a section on email from Dave Crocker’s Living Internet and Tom Van Vleck’s entry that credits Noel Morris as Tom’s partner in electronic mail creation starting in 1965 (and noted by Noel’s brother film-maker Earl as discussed earlier on this blog). Success has many fathers, but Tom and Noel are clearly the first to implement a mail program. Meanwhile Megan Garber writing in The Atlantic discovers what I (and many others) have been claiming right along, “‘The Future of Email’ … Looks a Lot Like Twitter”. What she discovers is:
I think I’ve mentioned earlier that Wave was a good idea executed terribly from a social point of view (to say the least). Nonetheless I found it useful as it combined many of my styles of communicating, integrated many of the sites and environments that I used to communicate and allowed me to “slice and dice” the various threads and conversations. I’m no longer interested in how to improve email or it’s best current implementation – Gmail — but if I were I’d be giving Fluent.io a test drive. November was my 6th month of #noemail and people have learned well how to reach me by means other than email. I think my “vacation” message offering the many alternatives to email helped a lot on this front. As you will see from my deep analysis of the 12 Gmail Priority Messages that I received, no one wrote me angry messages or felt the need to explain to me why I must use email (save one sender). I divide email-ers into four categories:
Most regular correspondents have already migrated to #noemail solutions. Final tally. About 100 non-Spam emails/day. About 20 of those per day were from well-meaning people. And of the 3,000 non-Spam emails received in November, 0.4% were Priority and from real people with real requirements. Or about 3 per week. Happy #noemail New Year. Thanks to Rebecca Radish who sends, via Twitter, a link to this NPR story, “Analyze This: You Wrote How Many Emails This Year?” The sweet little app requires Gmail but promises interesting results and insights to those who dare look at their own email habits. Felix Salmon writing for Reuters in an article just published as “How social networks beat email” reports:
Steve Gillmor of Gillmor Gang writes in TechCrunch about “Remembering Email” which is much like remembering the magic of Top 40 Radio or maybe the first clear FM stations. Steve notes that notifications have taken over his attention and ours, but even more the attention of our kids.
Dec
07
2011
Thierry Breton’s got some ’splainin’ to do — so he does #noemailPosted by Paul in #noemail
Here’s the gist in a quote from the release:
So far so good. But after a panic and overreaction this past week, Thierry Breton was on BBC explaining the program largely by quoting or restating the same information that can be found in the February 2011 press release. One thing not much noticed in the US press is that the driver for #noemail isn’t a capricious decision by Breton, but a suggestion from an employee-run study group. The company is made up of young people and getting younger as it grows. As studies cited earlier in this blog show, the kids don’t get email. Especially clunkers like Outlook.
One note of clarity and of amusement: Breton supports external email (clarifying part). His email as posted on his bio page is more-info@atos.net a generic company email addy. Much of the media is jazzed about Thierry Breton’s decision to end corporate email within Atos SA in the next 18 months. Can he do it? Is he sane? What will come of it if it does work? And hey, we did that already ourselves. In this last camp are: Klick in INC’s “The Company That Outlawed Email”, BonitaSoft in GigaOM as Email in the enterprise: entering its twilight at 40? and How We Killed Email: To Save Time and Sanity. The second by BonitaSoft CEO Miguel Valdes Faura and third by Josh Smith of GotToBeMobile and Notebooks offer suggestions for alternatives and productivity enhancers that would be quite helpful to anyone embarking on a corporate #noemail campaign. The New York Times catches the #noemail wave in their Room for Debate blog with the cleverly rhymed “Should Workplaces Curtail E-Mail?”. Here four experts or at least four people with vested opinions write short provocative essays to give rise to a spirited discussion or just troll for responses. Email or #noemail experts offered are: Nicholas G. Carr author of “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” and a lecturer on no email and no social networking who uses underdeveloped brain research to argue that Google/Internet/email makes us stupid(er). In his piece “Put the Cost Back in Communication,” Carr argues predictably that distractions — email and social media make you stupid(er). William Powers, the author of “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age,” has a twitter handle @HamletsBB. He’s not worried about his brain changing — he can quote Plato still — but he is concerned that we need both connectedness and disconnectedness. A basic “let’s use technology appropriately” argument. How could that go wrong? In some ways, it’s Nicholas Carr lite. In his essay, “The Phony ‘Zero E-Mail’ Alarm,” Power praises connectedness and warns of overload citing Jonathan Spira’s “Overload! How Too Much Information is Hazardous to Your Organization” for support. Finally, Power suggests that we meet Face to Face. In full disclosure, I can say that I’m closest to Power’s position (so far). Peggy Duncan, an Atlanta-based personal productivity expert and Outlook consultant, and the author of “Conquer Email Overload with Better Habits, Etiquette and Outlook 2007″ thinks the technology is just fine. People need to change. It’s so simple. Their brains aren’t changing, but they should be changed. People should follow the rules and suggestions in her book. Or hire her as a consultant. Get rid of face to face; let employees “meet with their in inboxes instead.” Peggy, you had me at Outlook. Srzly? That leaves us with my ole pal and #noemail pioneer Luis Suarez aka @elsua. Luis as readers of this blog know is a social computing evangelist at IBM, helping to accelerate the adoption of social networking tools as business tools. And Luis has been off corporate email and on social media solutions since 2008. You might expect that Luis would make a strong case for #noemail. But you would be wrong. Luis instead cautions against being too rash or too quick to kick out email in his essay “What We Would Miss.” As much as I respect Luis, I feel he is too moderate in his message especially given that this is a debate. True that Carr and Power aren’t taking the side of email at all. But neither are they exactly on the side of the move to social media. Luis and I have long had a disagreement about email as the best way for a private interchange (he says it is and I say you gotta be kidding, DM or SMS or other messaging is better for this) and to schedule meetings (he says it is and I say you gotta be kidding, use a shared calendar or Doodle.com). Unlike the other authors, Luis responds to every comment that is at least half sane. Props to Luis! He is social. He is doing the work. He is not even selling a book. As a result, Luis’ thread is by far the best read of the debate. Social rules! Especially when lead by and experienced social media communicator. While some like Observer (UK) writer John Naughton are LOLing over Mark Zuckerberg’s observation that email is dead,” others, like Atos SA (Europe’s Largest IT Company) CEO Theirry Breton are kicking email out of their companies. “The email is no longer the appropriate (communication) tool. The deluge of information will be one of the most important problems a company will have to face (in the future). It is time to think differently.” Obvious statements to folks reading this blog or who have since shutoff email themselves. Not that everyone agrees. Dudley Dawson at examiner.com composed a long whine about Breton including a critic of his English (or of the translator’s version of Breton. I await to read with some anticipated glee Dawson’s French postings.) Dawson raises many points, misfiring on each and misinterpreting all while missing the main point — collaboration and social are less served by email. But with Atos and IBM both pushing for #noemail workplaces, Naughton’s claim that “[T]he main reason young people don’t use email is that they haven’t yet joined the world of work” becomes more empty and obviously reactionary and tired. Work at great companies isn’t about getting stuck in unproductive technologies but about pressing forward to a more efficient and productive future — without email. A recent BBC article, Clash of the titans: Email v social media by Fiona Graham (Nov 25, 2011) falls solidly and flatly in the “He said, she said” camp of reporting. Ping ponging back and forth between experts on social media — Zuckerberg is pictured with his vision of better messaging’s somewhat redundant six points — informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short — Graham recounts very briefly the history of email name-checking @ sign promulgator Ray Tomlinson in the process. Overdue attention is given to MIME creator Nathaniel Borenstein. Borenstein notes that email use continues to grow and rues the slow uptake that IBM’s LotusLive has seen. Graham notes that until recently Borenstein was an IBM employees working on LotusLive. Borenstein became chief scientist at email management company, Mimecast, in June 2010 Who speaks for social? Lee Bryant, co-founder of Headshift, the world’s biggest social business consultancy (according to Graham). I wonder what he will say. “He believes email’s dominance over business communications is coming to an end.” Since he’s based his business on this, I guess so. But setting the snark aside for a paragraph or two, I agree with Bryant as he opines: For a finale, Graham turns to Dave Coplin, head of Microsoft’s Envisioneers team. The guy who works for a company heavily invested in email solutions — Outlook, Exchange and HotMail — and famously unsuccessful at anything social can’t find anything wrong with email. Social media is just a “shiny new penny.” The Envisoneer is no Imagineer. He cannot speak publicly in a way that would disrupt his company. He does in the course of the discussion utter a keen observation: “I think that email is dead when it comes to social media in the same way that snail mail was dead when it came to email.” Perhaps he’s still writing letters in the way we wrote them in 1960 or sending postcards as frequently. Maybe he hasn’t noticed that the USPS is seeing a precipitous drop in first class mail usage. Heck, we don’t even get billed on paper any more. Yes, I agree with the Softie: snail mail is diminished and fading like AM radio. Email will soon follow.
Nov
09
2011
Move away from your inbox & start working together! #noemailPosted by Paul in #noemail, GeneralA tribute to Luis Suarez (aka @elsua) in the form of a Dutch/English language site — Moving/Collaborating/Sharing/Connecting/Thinking/Helping/Innovating/Working/Living Outside the Inbox — from IBM Netherlands. Includes the Prezi from my talk at Duke last month “#noemail – Why you could/should/must use better ways of communicating than email” and this interview with Luis:
Nov
02
2011
Look ma, #noemail !: blogs and IRC as primary and preferred communication tools in a distributed firm.Posted by Paul in #noemailAditya Johri. (Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA) Abstract
Original post at Mashable Comics by Matt Silverman. Discovered at Fail Blog’s Work Fail section by @tuckcomatus Louis Richardson’s slides, as seen below, with his narration as a YouTube video. Recommended. Menachen Wecker’s article “5 Tips for Managing Your Campus E-mail: Students can use a variety of techniques, including filtering, creating folders, and flagging spam” begins:
In the course of the article, I offer more advice about managing email in college including: Don’t use it, Let others read it instead, and Unsubscribe from every listserv that you can possibly unsubscribe to. Read. Enjoy. Learn. Do.
Oct
21
2011
Social uber email in Business by Carolyn, Luis, Luis, and Louis – 3 stories of #noemailPosted by Paul in #noemail
Luis Benitez includes a SlideShare from IBM’s Louis Richardson: Get your head out of your inbox
View more presentations from Louis Richardson
Benitez also includes this terse but useful summary of Richardson’s presentation:
Oct
21
2011
@elsua – Luis Suarez tells #jamcamp about Living in a World Without EmailPosted by Paul in #noemail, GeneralGreat, if a bit noisy, hall interview with Luis Suarez at Jamcamp yesterday. He is down to three social networks: Twitter, Google Plus and IBM Connections (for work) –no Facebook (because he dislikes the Terms of Service). Good insights. Including how to stay in contact with your clients without email. Thomas Ciszek of the Search Agency looks great in a bow tie as he talks about alternatives to email in this video. What: The Logic and Destiny of #noemail Prezi: Here Now with The Who doing the Kids Are Alright or as http://tinyurl.com/noemail-uncctc Description: Nearly 30 years ago Paul Jones began working on unified messaging systems leading from Call-OS, USENET, WYLBUR, TSO, BITNET, DARPA, ARPA to modern (for its time) SMTP mail. That was then, and this is now. Email has become a zombie that doesn’t realize that it’s dead and falling apart, a vampire that sucks your life’s blood away slowly each night. You’ve probably noticed this yourself. Jones has put email behind him. In an attempt to atone for his part for inflicting email on UNC, he is exploring alternatives to email with a shotgun and a wooden stake (and Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.) as his tools. |